Did the Bushes get to George Tenet?
Advance Man

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070702&s=tyler070207

by Patrick Tyler
Post date 06.26.07 | Issue date 07.02.07

George Tenet was in a rush to cash in--or, at least, that was the impression he gave. No CIA director had ever moved so quickly to write an account of his tenure. After resigning his post in June 2004, Tenet swiftly retained Robert Barnett--agent to the Washington stars, renowned for negotiating monumental advances for Bill and Hillary Clinton, among others--to organize a secretive auction for his memoir. The winner--with a bid of slightly over $4 million, according to a publishing source--was Random House's Crown Publishing Group. But the real winner, at least initially, was Tenet, who was best known for describing the case that Iraq had WMD as a "slam dunk" and who would now have the opportunity to distance himself from that fiasco--while getting paid handsomely to do so.

Photo Courtesy Reuters/Larry Downing/FileAnd then an odd thing happened. Sometime between the auction and the moment when a contract should have been inked, Tenet balked, informing Random House that he had decided to delay the book. Eighteen months would pass before Tenet approached the publishing industry again. By that time, the value of his story had fallen dramatically. In the end, HarperCollins--which had bid $4 million the first time around, barely losing out to Random House--won the second auction with a bid that was just half its original offer, according to the publishing source. Tenet has done nothing to correct media reports--in The New Yorker and elsewhere--that he received $4 million to write the book. But Barnett, who represented him in the negotiations, conceded to me that "all of the numbers" he has seen publicly reported about Tenet's contract were wrong and that the delay caused his client to settle "for less."

Which raises a question: Why did a man who seemed so bent on cashing in put off writing his memoir--at a loss of some $2 million?

There can be no doubt that, while the delay was costly to Tenet, it was very valuable to the White House. The net effect was to push the book's publication date beyond the 2006 midterm elections. In the course of these book deliberations, Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Coincidence? Tenet says yes. "My decision not to proceed was based solely on my desire to let some time pass, to do more research, and to gain some perspective," he told me over e-mail last week. "No other reason."

And it certainly seems plausible that Tenet "was not ready to write the book," as he had said to me in an interview earlier this month. But he was not very clear on why this realization struck him after he had gone to the trouble of hiring a lawyer and conducting an auction. Nor was he clear on what conversations he'd had with members of the Bush family during the 18-month interval between auctions.

The reason I was asking such questions was because Tenet's book had come up last summer when I was interviewing Prince Bandar--a close friend of Tenet, former Saudi ambassador to Washington, and confidant of the Bush family who has been described as a surrogate son to the elder Bush. At the time, the book--which would eventually be published in April 2007 under the title At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA--was headed for a long security review, a process designed to prevent sensitive information from slipping inadvertently into books by officials who have had access to intelligence.

Bandar told me that he had been contacted by Tenet to check some of the references to Saudi Arabia. But he also told me something quite revealing about how the Bush family operates behind the scenes. "I knew President Bush called him," Bandar explained. "The question is: Was it 41 or 43?" Bandar thought it very unlikely that George W. Bush called. "He would not have had it in him to come and say [to Tenet], 'Please, please, don't write this book.' It is not in his character."

Tenet, Bandar says, greatly admires Bush 41, and the feeling is mutual. It was under Tenet that the CIA's headquarters in Langley was renamed the George H.W. Bush Center for Intelligence. And Bandar explains that Tenet "shared with Senior more things than people know." In other words, the two men were close. Bandar's guess is that, after he heard about the book, the elder Bush--or a family member acting on his behalf--contacted Tenet and said something like, "This is not dignified. You are not from the State Department. You are the CIA, and you are keeping the flag up."

When I asked Tenet whether he had received a call from President Bush--either one--to express concerns about the book, he became quite agitated and said everything I had heard in that regard was a "complete fabrication." I was almost startled when he said, "I swear on my father's grave" that no such counsel from the former or current president had been forthcoming. A week or so later, when I asked him to put in writing what he wanted to reiterate about the matter, Tenet said this: "Neither President GHW Bush nor President GW Bush--nor anyone acting on their behalf--influenced me or sought to influence me. No one." For his part, Bush Senior sent me the following statement: "It is absolutely not true. I never discussed with George Tenet when or if he should write a book. There is not even a semblance of truth to this."

Whether or not Bandar's theory is true, the Bush camp was clearly paying close attention to the book. It wasn't just the CIA that vetted Tenet's memoir; the White House press office did as well. What's more, according to a foreign diplomat who visited the Oval Office earlier this year, President Bush seemed well-briefed on the revelations in Tenet's manuscript. The visitor, whom I have known for years, asked the president about Tenet's book in passing. Bush replied that he understood the book would soon be cleared and that it contained no criticism of the president but had some tough words about "others" in the administration. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the end, the Bushies got just about everything they wanted out of what could have been a dicey situation. For one thing, the book wasn't nearly as nasty toward Bush as it might have been, especially given the depth of Tenet's private disdain for Bush's handling of the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. For another, the White House, armed with foreknowledge of the memoir's contents, was able to put Tenet on the defensive from the moment the book appeared--unlike when Richard Clarke's book came out and the administration seemed caught off guard.

But, perhaps most important, Tenet's late publication date ensured that his revelations would not affect the outcome of the midterms. Of course, we'll probably never know whether Tenet was listening to Bush or his own conscience when he held back publication and caused the value of his memoir to plummet by some $2 million. Either way, though, Tenet did the Bush family a very expensive favor.